Alex Batty, the young British man who disappeared in Malaga when he was 11 years old and was found six years later, now aged 17, in France, near Toulouse, left for his country this afternoon. His plane took off at five in the afternoon, via Amsterdam, and will land in London, according to the Toulouse prosecutor, Antoine Leroy.
The young man thus puts an end to his French journey: he was kidnapped by his mother and grandfather and has been traveling through the Gallic Pyrenees since 2020, leading a nomadic life, without schooling and living in a kind of spiritual community. They moved, moving their own comfort plates and feeding on the garden on duty. No mobile phone.
This way of life (which has allowed them to leave almost no trace of their identity) is what has prevented the authorities from finding him before, although the grandmother reported his disappearance in August 2017. She is the one who had custody of the young man, due to to the mother’s instability (the father had abandoned them).
She asked him for permission to take him to Malaga for a fortnight on vacation. That’s where she lost track. His mother and grandfather took Alex, they spent two years living in Morocco and then moved to France. In all those trips, even changing countries, no one noticed that Alex Batty was missing.
The boy was found early Wednesday morning. His mother wanted to go to Finland and the young man decided that he no longer wanted that itinerant life. This is what he himself told the gendarmes. He left the spiritual community they were in and has spent the last four days and four nights walking through the mountains, until he was found at dawn by a French student who makes a living delivering medicines in the area.
Alex is scheduled to arrive this afternoon in London, where he will be accompanied by members of the British police and then meet his grandmother. She has reduced mobility and she could not travel to look for him in France, as Leroy explained. France has already delegated Alex’s story and the British authorities will be in charge of clarifying some points of the story, such as what happened to his mother, supposedly in Finland.